Crossroads targets House races

The powerful conservative groups American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS are launching a new, $10-plus million advertising offensive hitting every level of the 2012 campaign — including the Crossroads groups’ first ad this cycle in a U.S. House race.

The bulk of the organizations’ spending is still aimed at capturing the White House and Senate for Republicans. American Crossroads, the super PAC arm of the Crossroads family, is putting $8.3 million into the presidential race, while Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit 501(c)4 that does not disclose its donors, is pumping $2.3 million into Senate and House races.

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The new presidential ads will appear in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia. In the fight for the Senate, Crossroads GPS is going after Democratic candidates in Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

The first Crossroads House target is New York’s 1st Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop is in a tough race against Republican challenger Randy Altschuler. It’s just the beginning of a congressional campaign push that will add up to the “tens of millions,” a Crossroads official said.

“Crossroads looks to spend in the tens of millions of dollars to keep the Republican majority in the U.S. House and promote a conservative agenda utilizing a variety of platforms — research, polling, phone calls, direct mail and television advertising,” said Crossroads spokesman Nate Hodson.

The move to engage in the battle for the House is not the only tactical shift in the new Crossroads blitz. The heavy super PAC spending in the presidential race is aimed at connecting with voters’ economic concerns in a newly emotional way — not with data about unemployment and growth, but with the stories of individual, anxious business owners.

The TV spot features two such small business people, Sherry Wuebben and Bill Schams, expressing concern about the future of their enterprises. The tone of the ad is somber, but not dark.

“Small businesses like ours are what have driven this country and President Obama just doesn’t seem to understand that,” Wuebben says. Explains Schams: “Obama definitely is making things harder for us. If he has four more years, I don’t think we’re gonna want to see what it looks like.”

A Crossroads strategist emphasized that the ad highlights “real people, not [a] doom and gloom voiceover.”

Many Republican ads this cycle, both from Mitt Romney and the outside groups boosting his campaign, have taken a more bluntly statistical approach to criticizing President Barack Obama’s economic record.